There are a number of writers in psychoanalysis that I enjoy reading. Thomas Ogden is one of them. Last week I read this description by him of the analytic process, a description which I find to be quite lovely:
"A person consults a psychoanalyst because he is in emotional pain, which unbeknownst to him, he is either unable to dream (i.e. unable to do unconscious psychological work) or is so disturbed by what he is dreaming that his dreaming is disrupted. To the extent that he is unable to dream his emotional experience, the individual is unable to change, or to grow, or to be become anything other than who he has been.The patient and analyst engage in an experiment within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation that is designed to generate conditions in which the analysand (with the analyst's participation) may become better able to dream his undreamt and interrupted dreams. The dreams dreamt by the patient and analyst are at the same time their own dreams (and reveries) and those of a third subject who is both and neither patient and analyst.
In the course of participating in dreaming the patient's undreamt and interrupted dreams, the analyst gets to know the patient in a way and at a depth that may allow him to say something to the patient that is true to the conscious and unconscious emotional experience that is occurring in the analytical relationship at a given moment. What the analyst says must be utilizable by the patient for purposes of conscious and unconscious psychological work, i.e., for dreaming his own experience, thereby dreaming himself more fully into existence. "
From This Art of Psychoanalysis:Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries